This quote from Shakespeare (King Lear, I think) should be remembered by all Clipper fans. It comes in handy. It doesn't make things better, but it provides a thumbnail guide for the possibility that our favorite squad is in retrograde, rather than moving forward.
I got myself psyched up again today, "once more into the breach!" and came up with one of my standard crackpot Club Optimism theories, that the coaching staff, such as it might be, had hampered the potentially potent Clipper SL attack by failing to start DJordan and Sofo side by side. Unleash the beasts, I said. It seemed like a simple enough adjustment, and it promised to solve everything.
That's not what happened.
Mercifully, I thought that the game started at 7pm, so I missed it. Thank FSM, the almighty, who watches over Club Optimism from time to time and spares it from the occasional horror. So I ended up "following the action" through the game thread, which got off to a positive start as the Clips scored 20% of their points in the first couple of minutes. When the going gets strange, however, the strange get weird, and the Clips were on their way towards setting an impressive standard for offensive inefficiency. And we're talking about the Clippers here, a franchise that has specialized in the dark arts of ineptitude.
But this was impressive. You want to see a 10 point quarter? (No thank you.) That's a brutal thing to survive and to watch. But let's set a 16 point quarter and an 18 point quarter, les temps d'ordures extraordinaire, alongside that 10 spot. Those 44 points in 36 minutes look like some super old school funk, n'est pas? Let's bring back Bob Kurland! We can put up that point a minute! Or not.
The Clipper SL squad put up a six point quarter. That's some gnarly funk, if I do say so myself. A 50 point game. A summer league game. Yikes! Do yourself a favor. Don't watch. I can tell you, it feels better.
So what have we got? You tell me. Nothing from Sofo. DJ rumblin, stumblin, doin nothin. Good start by AFA, bad game. Bledsoe, the guy who was the best news out of game one, not playing against John Wall? Say hello to John Lucas !!!. (What is JL3's tennis game like?) A step back for EBledsoe, a step closer to Mike Taylor.
SP is in full reverse mojo mode, and FSM knows what that means during a summer trip to Vegas. He had a computer glitch and mentioned that a zhiv might go up top until he can get organized. So this is it, asking the question: does "it's the Clippers" trump "it's summer league"?